Privacy advocates, however, see the bill as a means for companies to forgo privacy laws and let the government see your otherwise personal information stored online.

Last year, the House voted on CISPA a day earlier than expected. It passed handily, with heavy Republican support and a mixed response from Democrats. However, perhaps because the White House issued a clear promise to veto the bill, it was never picked up in the Senate.

The text of CISPA 2.0 is largely the same; the bill's been amended somewhat, though privacy groups think those changes are mostly cosmetic.

But the battle around it looks very different this year.

Though tech companies were largely mum on CISPA before the 2012 House vote, many have now laid their cards on the table. Reddit, Craigslist, and Mozilla have actively advertised their opposition on their sites.

The people have spoken as well. Millions have signed at least one of the many anti-CISPA petitions floating around the Internet, and it look less than a month for more than 100,000 Americans put their name on an official White House petition against the bill.

It's unclear how CISPA would perform if does pass the House. It was too toxic for the Senate last year; the Senate at the time was trying to pass its own cybersecurity bill, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012. But that bill failed twice, and its champion, Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), has since retired. And the White House, though it criticized the CISPA, no longer promises to veto it.

On Wednesday, the highly controversial Cyber Intelligence Security Protection Act (CISPA) was reintroduced to the House of Representatives. You've most likely been seeing plenty of headlines about it, and there's a decent chance that you realize that it's kind of a big deal, but you’re not clear on why it's so contentious or how it could actually affect you.